This seems to be a separate issue with Windows PyPy 3.6

I ran tests/unit/create/test_creator.py in Windows PyPy 3.6 (v7.3.3) and got errors in the same tests as CI, except test_create_distutils_cfg[venv] that passes locally and fails on CI, most likely due to timeout.

Local tests fails when the test_create_no_seed[venv*] checks exe files, but CI errors causes when same tests find an exception in creator.debug:

{
  "err": "The system cannot find the file specified",
  "exception": "SyntaxError('invalid syntax', ('<unknown>', 0, 1, '\\n', 0))", 
  "out": "",
  "returncode": 2
}

The SyntaxError was happened in creator.py because of literal_eval(out) when out is empty.

I can't reproduce the exception locally, but I modified the debug info to look something like:

{
  "err": "[Errno 2] The system cannot find the file specified: '<file>'",
  "exception": "OSError<...>", 
  "out": "",
  "returncode": 2
}

Windows PyPy <= 3.6 contains only pypy3.exe and pypy3w.exe and creating a virtual environment with venv does not hanlde missing executables, e.g. python.exe. Also, the stdlib path for old PyPy versions is <host>\site-packages instead of <host>\Lib\site-packages.

Local tests failures are fixed by creating missing executables.

Test coverage calculation is fixed by adding stdlib path for old PyPy versions into .coveragerc sources.